April 30, 2004:

I figured something out today that's been a
mystery for a long time: Why PocoMail will sometimes bring down messages
with headers but no bodies. The damaged messages always contain this line:

X-Poco-Decode-Error: Cannot
find boundary

It only appears to happen when I have POPFile installed and working between
my POP server and Poco. Long-time readers may recall my struggling with
this issue last fall (see my entries for November 20 & 28, 2003) and
guessing that it was Poco's problem, because mail accounts that do not
pass through POPFile get an occasional message munged as well.

I had a hunch that something in Poco was getting out of sync with something
else in Poco, and usually when parts of a program get out of sync, it's
because one something is taking a long time and the other something can't
wait for it. My intuition was that Poco was taking an increasing amount
of time testing for blocked senders in junksenders.txt, and checking message
bodies for text strings that I had stored in junkbody.txt. These two files
have grown enormously in the past year: 4,174 lines in junksender.txt,
and another 2,366 lines in junkbody.txt.

So I did something I should have tried ages ago: I blanked out both files.
I don't need them now, since in only three days POPFile has reached 98.94%
accuracy, and training POPFile is way easier than trying to stay ahead
of the spammers, who are constantly buying new domains and retiring their
old ones. (I kept copies of the full files, and the last updates are available
if you want them from ftp.duntemann.com.)

Mirabile dictu! Since I blanked the two filter files, not a single
message has come in munged. Not one! I was getting about one in twenty
before, which doesn't sound bad, but when it's a real message, well, that's
bad. So it looks like I can now use POPFile and Poco together without
losing any message bodies. I'm ok with that, heh. I'm going to pass the
information on to Slaven and his gang and see if they can find the hotspot
in the code, but in truth I don't much care anymore. POPFile does the
job. I don't need to create a client-side black hole anymore, though it
would be an intersting exercise.

Interestingly, the next release of Poco Mail will contain a built-in
Bayesian filter, and it will be interesting to see if it can match POPFile
for accuracy. This seems to be a trend; mail client The
Bat! has a Bayesian filtering plug-in, though it took a great deal
of screwing around to figure out how to work it. Mozilla Thunderbird has
one too, though in my testing it didn't learn very quickly nor very well.

BTW, I will be on the radio again tonight, talking (as usual) about spam
and promoting Degunking Windows. Tune in to KLAV-AM in Las Vegas
(1230 kilocycles—I love saying that!) or try their
Internet radio feed. It's a whole hour, from 6 PM Pacific time until
7. I'll be talking about POPFile, POPTray, and the futility of keyword filtering.
See you there!

April 29, 2004:

I
just stumbled across one of the most original tech concepts I've seen
in years: Poco Mail's
EmailVoyager, which is basically a USB flash drive with a copy of
Poco Mail Portable Edition preinstalled, along with some proprietary technology
that hooks into the USB driver and launches Poco Mail PE when the device
is inserted in any USB port.

For years I've done various things to schlep my mailbase around with
me when I travel. I can't just leave everything on my server until I get
home; I'm constantly pruning and sorting and organizing the mailbase,
which (even after a catastrophic crash last fall) still represents about
15,000 messages. Not pruning and sorting and organizing is how
my mailbase got so big to begin with, so I'm pretty conscientious about
it now.

Usually I transplant the whole thing from my desktop to my laptop using
Poco's built-in backup/restore features, by writing out a backup copy
over the network to my laptop and then restoring the laptop's copy of
Poco from the backup. At least while the laptop's networking machinery
was functional this worked fine. (After that I used ZIP drives.) When
I got back home, I did the same thing in reverse. It's awkward, but it
works. With Email Voyager, I could still use my laptop to read mail when
I travel, but I wouldn't be tied to the laptop. I could use my nephews'
PCs while I'm visiting them in Chicago, or the desktop machine I keep
in my mother-in-law's basement. I could use a machine in a library (assuming
it was new enough to have an accessible USB port) or at an Internet cafe.
Plus, if somebody swiped my laptop, they wouldn't necessarily get my mailbase.

The Web site is a little vague on how you sync an EmailVoyager with the
standard version of PocoMail, but if they're smart they'll figure it out
and make it seamless, and that would indeed be a formidable gadget.

I'm probably going to buy one and write it up for the book. (Yes, buy. I
have a policy of not seeking out nor even accepting "review" materials for
my books. We're not talking king's ransom here, and I like not being beholden
to vendors. I pick 'em, I buy 'em, and I call 'em as I see 'em.) In the
meantime, does anybody know how to make an app launch on plugging in a USB
drive? I'd like to do the same thing with Aardmarks and my bookmarks database,
which I have long kept on an old 16 MB Q flash drive. (See my August 27,
2001 entry.)

April 28, 2004:

Some odd lots before I get back to work on Degunking
Email, Spam, and Viruses:

Ron Burk pointed out that Google's SafeSearch has apparently been
fixed (see my entry for April 25, 2004) and we can now reach PartsExpress
and the Girls School of Austin without incident.

There is apparently a comet now hovering over the eastern horizon
just before dawn, but as good as my eastern horizon and my binoculars
are, I haven't spotted it yet. If you have darker skies than I (and
we're looking east across one of the nation's largest Army bases here)
take a look for comet LINEAR and see if you can catch it. As May opens,
a second comet (NEAT) will sneak out from the sun's glare in the morning
as well. This
article on the Sky & Telescope site will show you where
to look.

Which leads us to a gripe of mine: Dumb comet names. NEAT? LINEAR?
Gimme a break. Comets should be named something like Figowicz-Schnarfenblum.
Yes, I know they were named after the spacecraft that discovered them,
but that just gets deeper toward the roots of the problem: Why do we
name spaceraft stupid things like LINEAR? What's wrong with names like
Jack Williamson's marvelous Good-Bye Jane? (Especially for spacecraft
that by design aren't ever coming back...)

Reader Jim Lemon wrote to suggest that my mysterious hamster crutch
artifact (see my entry for April 19, 2004) may well be a rock guard
from an antique sickle bar lawn mower. I couldn't find anything on the
Web (the word "ELL" or "ELLI" is stamped into the iron and may be some
kind of trademark) but Jim points out that the rock guards tended to
break or fall off with great regularity, to take their permanent places
in the soil profile—permanent, that is, until scraped out of the
dirt by a curious character like me.

Ironies come in all shapes, sizes, flavors, and degrees of subtlety,
but this is a good one: Of all the many parts of my several telescopes,
the only parts that I cannot find are the finder scopes. Oh,
well.

April 27, 2004:

My Web hosting contract with Interland runs
out next month, and earlier today I established a new account at SectorLink,
which costs less money and gives me a lot more power. Interland wouldn't
even give me a Perl interpreter, much less MySQL; SectorLink gives me
all of that plus PHP, five simultaneous domains, and lots of other things
I don't fully understand as yet. I will thus be able to pull a few of
my other domains out of the parking lot and actually use them. Kris Sotelo,
who used to lay out the late and lamented Visual Developer Magazine,
will be redesigning my Web site for me later this year. I'll be posting
a site for Copperwood Press (see my entry for April 1, 2002) and with
any luck at all will begin selling the first of several books I intend
to publish myself, including my novel.

Also, my primary email address will change. I'm a little tired of fighting
spam the hard way, and some time in the next month or so will probably turn
off duntemann.com for a few months to see if spammers really do clean their
databases. I will be emailing all my regular correspondents to let them
know what my new address will be (it will be under the copperwood.com domain)
and will also post a bitmap representation of it here. I'm intrigued by
PHP and hope to try it out, though I'm not sure what the project may be.
And finally, I'll be able to use a real Web diary program and not this ancient
hand-bashed lashup that I've been using since early 2000. Should be an interesting
year here. Stay tuned.

April 26, 2004:

The
problem with high bookshelves is that you have to be able to reach them.
We have the rolling ladder on our library wall, and it's a fine thing,
too. But we also have high shelves in the pantry, as well as a smaller
book wall here in my office, with a shelf at just under 8'. So I bought
a Kramer Kik-Step stool
(left) and we love it. It rolls under the bottom shelf in the pantry with
an inch or so to spare...but while it's built like a battleship, it contains
so much genuine rubber that it makes the pantry smell like a Discount
Tire showroom. (It's currently exiled to the back deck to air out a little.)

I lucked
out in dealing with the high shelves here in my office. While shopping
for a coffee table, we happened upon a weird little item that suggested
Shaker origins, though it was actually manufactured in China, like almost
everything else these days. It looks like a small wooden chair and can
function as one if needed; it's currently the "guest chair"
here, unless you count my reading chair as a guest chair. On the other
hand, the chair is split on a diagonal beneath the seat and hinged: When
you grab the top rail and flip it forward, the chair becomes a stepladder.
It's the guldurndest thing. And although it's not well balanced and has
to be flipped with care to avoid tossing the whole thing on its face,
it looks cool and really does let me get up to the high shelf with ease.

The most astonishing thing about it was the price: $29.95 list, on sale
for $25.95. I had to assemble it, but in doing so I saw clearly that it's
made of a good dense wood and lots of it, with key joints fastened via allen-head
screws (hidden beneath wooden plugs) rather than glued. I'm not sure where
you'll find them, but it's the coolest piece of low-tech I've acquired in
a very long time.

April 25, 2004:

I ran across a
ZDNet article this morning on how Google's SafeSearch content filters
indiscriminately block any domain with the letter sequence "sex" in it,
even when the site isn't remotely about sex. All the usual dirty words
are filtered out, plus a few surprising ones. Examples of clobbered domains
include:

and so on and on, not to mention anything relating to Sussex in England.
Although Google claims that SafeSearch "uses advanced proprietary technology
that checks keywords and phrases" and filters out only Web pages "containing
pornography and explicit sexual content" it sure looks like a completely
idiotic text-literal search algorithm that any brain-damaged CS freshman
could knock out in an hour, if that. (Sounds like five lines of Delphi
to me.)

I don't much like server-side spam filtering for this reason: Most server-side
spam filters err on the conservative side, and the server people don't
care. Why should they? There is no way to check on them; no local
logs; no way to tell if you're not getting useful messages. At least with
SafeSearch you know when your domain is being nukedand sooner or
later, either bad press or lawsuits will force Google to rethink their
filtering techniques, and maybe put some genuine "advanced technology"
into the effort.

Filtering images is hard. I first noticed this problem a while back,
when I first discovered the image search features on booth Google
and AllTheWeb,
both of which have filters that claim to knock out porn from the search
results. They're damned useful when you have an odd word in hand and want
to know what its namesake looks like. Search on "bugia" or "ostensorium"
and you'll get a quicker look at the artifact in question than you would
if you had to hunt down a dictionary of obscure Catholic liturgical paraphernalia.
The problems came in when I was looking for pictures of some odd transmitting
tubes. Search on "8877" or "815" with content filtering off, and much
of what you see will be hardcore porn images, along with hordes of other
irrelevant images of almost every kind, because of numeric strings embedded
in digicam-generated file names. (Watch out for AllTheWeb in particular—not
for the squeamish!) On the other hand, when I turned content filtering
on, a lot of the legitimate images vanished too. No kids here, and porn
bores me, though I get irritated paging past it looking for something
pertinent. So I grit my teeth and deal with it.

Still, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: Filtering cannot be
completely automated. Why do we continue to try?

April 24, 2004:

Networking hasn't been working well on my laptop
for some time now, and I was never able to figure out why. Everything
looked fine from the Physical up through the Transport layer, and it would
work the Internet as long as it had a connection, but Windows Networking
hostnames would not propagate either from it or to itexcept very
occasionally, when my other machines could see the laptop but not browse
its shares. Most of the time, the laptop was network-invisible and network-blind,
and something was clearly clobbered in the Windows network machinery itself.

Unlike most PCs, the laptop—an IBM Thinkpad X21didn't come
with any kind of Windows OEM or reinstallation CD. Instead, there is a
hidden partition on the hard drive containing the OS and hardware-associated
software and drivers in compressed form. If your Windows installation
dies the death, you press F11 during POST and the recovery program takes
over, which then re-creates your Windows instance, just as it was when
the machine came out of the box. I got fed up last night and after spending
a few minutes copying some data out to a SanDisk USB flashdrive, I turned
Product recovery loose.

It took almost two hours, just like the manual said, and it encompassed
a huge amount of console-mode grimbling and scripting and automated screwing
around, but as clumsy as the system looked in operation, it worked as
advertised, and I now have a reconfigured laptop that networks perfectly
and runs way faster than before, probably because it has a brand-new and
uncorrupt Registry. My suspicion is that some spyware that I deleted messed
over Windows Networking (the trial version of the Snood game comes with
that damfool Bonzai Buddy) and when that happens, reinstalling Windows
is pretty much your only recourse.

I mention this in detail because in recent weeks, my #2 spam category has
become OEM software CDs. (Painkillers are #1, and penis pills have fallen
to #3.) As I understand it, a court case somewhere gave people the right
to resell OEM CDs if they want to, and as with the painkillers market, black
market goods join the gray market for legitimacy's sake, and I suspect some
OEMs are quietly selling some disks to the spammers to make a little money.
Having your recovery "CD" in a partition on the hard drive that only the
recovery utility can access gives the consumer nothing to duplicate or sell.
If your hard drive as a whole fails, IBM will sell you a new one, and replacing
it can be done without dismantling the whole device. Me, I think I'd rather
have the CD, but if I had the CD I'd have to put it somewhere and then remember
where that somewhere is. All in all, it's a pretty interesting solution
to a problem Microsoft and Adobe moan about a lot, and I wonder why in this
age of supertanker hard drives, more PC vendors don't do it.

April 23, 2004:

A few odd lots on this why-is-it-snowing-like-hell-at-the-end-of-April
day:

Yup. Snowing. Started last night at dusk and it's been snowing for
over 24 hours now. There is about 6-8" of sloppy slushy snow out front.
Too weird. I'm not complaining; they're getting 1-2 feet up in
the mountains, and that's where our drinking water comes from, so we're
all cool with that down here in the foothills, slush or no slush.

At the Delphi Meetup last night, Phil Criley identified the mystery
artifact I showed in my April 19 entry as a clip used in the assembly
of cement forms. I went back to my hundreds of digital photos of the
house here taken during construction, and it's quite clear that the
cement form subcontractor was using an entirely different system. No
clips in sight anywhere. On the other hand, contractors here pass fill
dirt around as a favor to one another, and we found plenty of nails
and other metallic stuff in the dirt that had clearly been in the dirt
a very long time. I guess as they build one house, they toss nails and
clips and junk on the ground beside it, and then when the next house
is excavated, all those dumped nails and clips go somewhere else on
a dump truck.

Also at the Delphi Meetup, Ben Oram mentioned that when he evaluates
any Delphi component that comes with source, he does a text search for
adjacent keywords EXCEPT END with nothing between them. This
indicates that the author is simply swallowing exceptions without making
any attempt to process them, and a guy who will do something as dumb
as that will do dumber things as well. That's a great trick, one I would
have paid him $50 to publish as a HAX, back when I was publishing HAX,
back when I had a magazine to publish HAX in, sigh.

I forgot to ask at the Meetup, but I've been looking around for some
way to use the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine in a Delphi program instead
of IE. This morning I found this
and have been reading it over; if any of you have used it successfully
I'd like to get your reactions.

April 22, 2004:

One of the world's most notorious spammers has
come up with a diabolical new idea: Pay people to act as relays for its
spam, making it harder to block by domain or address. Sendmails
Corporation, which may or may not be based in Manchester, NH, has
created a system called VirtualMDA
(Mail Delivery Agent). VirtualMDA does with money what a lot of spammers
do with viruses: Puts a mail proxy on some starving slob's PC. Unlike
the virus spammers, it then pays according to machine cycles expended
by that PC sending out spam.

It's not a lot of money; the rate is currently $1 per CPU hour. That
in itself is deceptive, since it may take a full day to rack up a CPU
hour. (Networking delays don't count as CPU time, heh.) Sendmails is quite
clear on its intent: To scatter a spam campaign across many email addresses
and make it harder to block. What they don't say to the idiots who will
sign up is that it may get their Internet service cut off, and may, though
it's still not clear, put them in legal jeapardy if any CAN SPAM violations
occur within the mailing. (Not that we're enforcing CAN SPAM at all.)

The press hasn't touched on the worst part of all this: With their spam
affiliates programs and now VirtualMDA, spammers are recruiting desperate
people to do their heavy lifting, hoping that public outcry will not settle
on single mothers who are about to be evicted for nonpayment of rent.
An unmarried young woman with two preschool children asked me a few years
ago what she could do with her computer that would bring in some money,
any money at all. I had no good suggestions for her, but it's even money
she's now a spammer.

My fervent hope is that one or more of those desperate young women will
lose her Internet account over VirtualMTA and sue the bastards. The public
would be more than willing to pillory Sendmails, and with all the money
to be made in spam, one can imagine that at some point the tort lobby will
smell blood in the water and get to work on the rest of them.

April 21, 2004:

Shucks. Something's going to happen on June
8 that hasn't happened in 122 years, and I'm gonna be on the wrong side
of the damned planet. On that day, Venus will cross in front of the disk
of the Sun, creating what might (if we were a whole lot closer
to Venus) be a sort of Cytherial eclipse. (I don't think I'll use the
term "venusian" orworse"venerial". I'm not sure what real
astronomers say in such a case.)

Transits of Venus happen quite rarely. The last one was in 1882. I recall
reading in my Golden Book of Astronomy as a kid in 1959 or so that
the next transit of Venus would happen in 2004, and I thought, Wow!
That's the Future! with visions of spaceships and aliens dancing in
my head. We're 0 for 2 on that score, unless you consider the Space Shuttle
a spaceship. (I was thinking of something that lands on its tail, with
retractable legs, just like in all the movies.)

Anyway. On June 8, the disk of Venus, which subtends an angular diameter
of about one arc-minute, will cross the disk of the Sun, which is about
31 arc-minutes. The crossing will take about six hours. There are subtleties
associated with diffraction of sunlight through Venus' atmosphere that
will have observers salivating. There were reports in earlier transits
of a silvery arc on Venus' edge after the planet had begun its ingress
to the Sun's disk, and also the "black drop" effect as the planet leaves
the Sun's disk, which we now know is an optical illusion and not a true
astronomical phenomenon. (They were still arguing about that in 1882.)

The real problem with this year's transit is that by sheer dumb luck,
the best place to see it is in central Asia. The eastern US will get a
tantalizing glimpse at sunrise on June 8, but Colorado is on the other
side of the cutoff, which falls on the Nebraska border, sigh. Europe is
reasonably well-placed, but one doesn't usually go to England to do solar
observations.

There is a saving virtue: Transits of Venus, like certain other good
and interesting things, always come in pairs, and for transits of Venus,
almost precisely 8 years apart. The last pair was in 1874 & 1882.
The current pair happens in 2004 and 2012. On June 6 of the month in which
I will celebrate my 60th birthday, we'll get another chance, and this
time, the US will be a lot more favorably placed. Alas, the Mayans, the
ancient Egyptians, and most
New Agers think the world will end that year, so we may miss it anyway,
dang that pesky Armageddon.

Web sites focusing on the transit have long been in place. This
one is my favorite, and will provide a lot of additional information
and further links. This
map shows where the 2012 transit will be visible. We here in North America
don't get the whole show, but I plan to be in Hawaii that day, celebrating
both Venus' dance across the sun and my dance into early middle age. Book
early. We're gonna party like it's 1999!

April 20, 2004:

I install and torment Linux every couple of
years, to see how far it's come along its long path toward Granny's desktop,
as everybody likes to say. Two years ago it was Red Hat 8, and I was pleased,
though I think Granny would still be pretty bollixed if she tried to use
it. Yesterday I installed SUSE 9, and I'm still pleased. It may even be
ready for Granny...if somebody else installs it for her.

SuSE's Installer YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) was pretty impressive,
though installing the whole thing took almost two hours, much of which
was apparently spent probing my hardware to find out what my system had.
And it did well in that department, nailing almost everything exactly.

I haven't been able to spend as much time as I'd like trying it out,
but so far I've found only two operational failings:

Samba isn't working correctly, and aborts whenever I try to browse
a shared network drive on one of my Windows machines. I haven't done
much with Samba in the past, so I'm going to have to study up on it
before I try to fix it. I'm not helped by the fact that the message
speaks of some unknown error, and suggests that it may be due to a bug
in Samba. If so, I'm out of my league, but I doubt it's a bug in such
a widely-used package. Networking is just freaky; we all know that.
(Ethernet works correctly, and I can surf the Web from Konqueror.)

Although it correctly detected and installed a driver for my HP 5370C
scanner, none of the various scanner-aware packages can launch a scan
operation. No error, but though the scanner lamp lights up, the scan
itself never begins.

Everything else works like a champ. KDE is beautiful, and although Open
Office doesn't talk to my synapses the way MS Office does, it looks completely
adequate for Granny, and almost anybody else who isn't tied to some specific
MS feature. My intuition is that if installed by knowledgeable people on
hardware known to be compatible with the OS, it's more than ready for prime
time. The real challenge is how to get all your MS-centric data converted
to something in the Linux/KDE world that can use it. Now that the desktop
is reasonably mature, it's time for the open source world to get to work
on the data conversion problem. Once that nut is cracked, there's no reason
to remain in the Windows prison.

April 19, 2004:

The
house is built, but we're going to be stubbing our toes (or lancing them)
on the construction debris scattered around outside for a good long while.
A week or so ago I took my big magnet outside the back door, rubbed it
around in the dirt, and came up with half a pound of various pointy-ended
hardware, mostly staples and bent nails. I recovered a small fortune in
deck screws that way (which found their way into my stash) though the
rest was garbage. However, by all margin the oddest thing we've turned
up in the dirt is shown at left. We have no idea what it is, but Carol
immediately called it a crutch for hamsters. "An emphatic crutch, at that!"
I added, with emphasis, if you get what I mean.

Interestingly, it looks like it's been in the dirt for a very long time,
like many of the bent nails. I can only assume that the fill dirt they
brought in was dug up from somebody else's construction site, and we've
inherited as many rusty nails (and other odd things, including half a
roller skate) as our project generated over the past ten months since
we broke ground.

But in truth, the thing is mysterious. It's almost exactly 4" long, by and
inch and change wide at its widest point. The legend "ELL" or "ELLI" is
embossed on it. I'm sure it's intended to be driven into something with
a really big hammer. Is it a climber's piton? Anybody got any ideas?

April 18, 2004:

In the several months since I discovered Skype,
I've gotten numerous Skype calls from people in other countries, none
of whom I knew prior to the call. In each case, they were testing out
the system by calling a randomly selected person. This morning, I got
a call from a person in South Africa who told me he was explicitly calling
people in different countries on different continents, trying to "collect"
as many countries and continents as possible.

As if amateur radio didn't have enough forces arrayed against it (deed
restrictions have basically made ham radio illegal in virtually all new
housing built in the last twenty years) now we have people creating a
Worked All Continents program on VoIP. I vaguely recall a humorous article
in one of the ham radio magazines from the mid-1960s, describing something
called the Special Subscriber Service. The (wholly fictitious) SSS was
a feature the phone company offered, which, when selected, would connect
you to a randomly chosen person somewhere else in the phone system, just
for a rag-chew. It was described in bombastically overdrawn language as
a serious threat to amateur radio, and all readers were encouraged to
write their congressman to protest.

It was in the April issue of the magazine in question, I recall. I'm
sure it was considered a scream by people at the time. Yet in looking
back, it was first the advent of personal computers, and (more significantly)
the Internet that corresponded with the aging of amateur radio. The median
age in the ham radio community is now somewhere in the high fifties, and
even in older housing where hamming is still legal, younger people, perhaps
realistically, are looking at today's heavily computerized, pushbutton
radios (some of which actually use your Windows display for all control
functions) and asking, Why is this different from the Internet?

Deed restrictions are certainly an issue, but even where they don't apply
(as in mobile radio) interest among the young is at best lukewarm. Perhaps
ham radio stalled when it got too easy. Like a lot of pursuits, you can
make it as challenging as you choose, but the critical point is the difficulty
of the bottom rung. Modern, all-in-one broadband radios require almost
nothing of the operator beyond the ability to read some relatively simple
instructions. I found that the case with my dazzling Icom 736: You select
a frequency, and the built-in tuner matched my length of random wire to
the chosen frequency. You then grab the mike, push the button, and call
CQ. A lot of the struggles I had overcome when first starting out in 1973
were simply not there, and much of the fun had gone out of the game. About
1995, I more or less lost interest in HF, and continued on where the challenges
were a little more engaging: Building my own gear from loose parts. The
downside is that the types of radios you can realistically expect to build
are either limited to Morse code or use modulation techniques that nobody
else uses anymore, like AM. In other words, you can build an AM transmitter,
but there won't be anybody on the air to talk to you.

The legendary Jim Kyle told me that as soon as he saw the Internet, he set
ham radio aside forever, and Jim has been a ham since before I was born.
It's depressing, but it may be inevitable. We don't encourage kids to build
things of any kind anymore (Heavens! They might hurt themselves!) and absent
that part of the hobby, the rest is increasingly commoditized and boring.
My longstanding suggestion of setting aside parts of the ham bands and then
forbidding the sale of commercial gear for those sub-bands has gone nowhere.
Beyond that, I have no suggestions. It's grim.

April 17, 2004:

Evidence continues to accumulate that fertilizing
the southern ocean with certain chemicals needed by phytoplankton can
pull huge amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and trap it
on the ocean floor. A
recent test by Moss Landing Marine Laboratories sprayed some soluble
iron compound onto the ocean surface near Antarctica, and then measured
the phytoplankton bloom that resulted. From their little test alone, 30,000
tons of CO2 was deep-sixed.

I first heard about this line of research a few years ago, and I was
struck by the leverage obtained between materials and effort expended
and the results obtained in terms of sequestered CO2. I think it was Bill
Higgins who quoted a scientist (whose name I have lost) as saying that
"Give me an oil tanker full of soluble iron, and I'll create an ice age."

Wow.

What this means, of course, is that for what for the Federal government
would be petty cash, we could sequester an arbitrary amount of CO2 on
the ocean floor, billions of tons of it if we chose. I think it
should be done, but although I've seen no reaction from our ever-so-vigilant
environmental lobby, I'd lay odds that they would attempt to block any
systematic attempt to fertilize the southern ocean on a large scale. The
danger they would point to, obviously, is that we could create
an ice age this wayor at very least trigger climatic change that
we can't predict. The danger I would point out in response is that we're
triggering climatic change ever day that we continue to burn carbon while
slandering nuclear power and letting mansion trash like the Kennedys NIMBY
wind farms to death. It would, in fact, make a great action-adventure
not-quite-SF novel: Gallant pragmatic environmentalists battle homicidal
Luddite Greens on the high seas as six rusty cargo ships steam toward
the Antarctic, with only one containing the iron slurry. (Yes, I'm only
half serious. It's up to you to guess which halfand hey, George,
why not write that novel anyway? I'd even publish it!)

The larger question is this: Should we try to fix global warming by finding
Gaia's pressure points and giving her a noodge? Or must we grit our teeth,
stop burning carbon, and accept the societal consequences? It's an important
question, since it's far from clear that we're running out of hydrocarbon
fuels as quickly as the doomsayers have predicted. Natural gas, in particular,
seems to be seeping up from parts unknown and recharging gas fields thought
to be depleted years ago. This is a good thing, if we can somehow manage
the carbon that comes out of the waste side of the equation. The nice thing
about the phytoplankton is that they eat carbon and die, sinking into the
ooze on the ocean bottom, to be eventually folded back into the crust from
which the carbon originally came. What's not to love about that?

April 16, 2004:

While looking around the Net for pictures of
my favorite bomber, the XB-70, I stumbled across the phenomenon of scan
collecting, and from it took an interesting insight: The record companies
should be glad that there's no unique identifier for individual songs
published on CDs.

Scan collecting seems to be centered on a Usenet group called alt.binaries.amp,
which has a huge pass-through of image files. About 30-40% of them
are soft-core porn, basically Playboy-type images of naked girls leaning
on trees. The rest cover a very broad range: Fine art, postage stamps,
trains, aircraft, classic cars, and so on. It's not random, either. There's
a system to it: Some fanatic somewhere creates an index of a certain number
of images, which is large but finite, usually a few hundred. The index
is in .csv format, and gives the name of each scan in the collection.
Collectors then scrounge around, looking for the files by their index
name, until they have them all.

Consider the concept of collecting hi-res images of stamps. They're generally
very well scanned, and can be blown up to fill your entire screen. Who
needs a magnifying glass? For that matter, who needs stamps?

It's unclear where most of the images come from, though some collections
(like images from Playboy's Cyber Club) are explicitly named. I'm sure
they're almost entirely pirated copies of clip-art collections or somesuch.
Stamps are an interesting example, because there are several authoritative
indexes of stamps, each with unique catalog numbers. The Scott catalog
is the most famous, with a unique number for every US stamp ever issued.
(There are catalogs of foreign stamps as well, but I remember the Scott
catalog from years ago, when I collected US stamps myself.)

The insight I had concerns such catalogs: If individual copyrighted files
can be given unique file names according to some kind of catalog, collecting
them through newsgroups could be completely automated. A usenet robot
could scan newsgroup headers, find file names fitting a certain collection
template, and download those that are not already in its database.

The record companies have not paid much attention to newsgroup file swapping
because it's not selection-driven. In other words, it's like listening
to the radio: You can't choose what's "on;" you have to be content with
what comes by. To find a specific track or image that you're looking for
takes a lot of effort entailing large amounts of time and eye-crossing
scanning of newsgroup header lists. If there were a unique naming system
for music tracks, such robots would appear quickly, and would just lurk
on the newsgroups until they found what they were looking for.

Newgroup servers that don't keep logs of who does what (and they're not
rquired to) are reasonably anonymous, assuming posters forge certain parts
of posting headers. A Usenet robot could listen for requests from other
Usenet robots, and post those files from its own database that have been
requested.

I'm a little surprised such tools don't yet exist, and I think the key reason
is the lack of a standard catalog for music tracks. If such a catalog ever
happens, Usenet music swapping will become automated, and it's considerably
tougher to discern who does what on newgroups without server-side logs.
The file-swapping wars are not over, and it'll be interesting to see how
they evolve in the next five or six years.

April 15, 2004:

Some odd lots on this beautiful spring day:

We got up this morning to see the streetlight out by the mailboxes
snapped over at waist height. I went over there when the city troubleshooter
came out to take a look. We thought it might have been the wind, which
was a little gusty last night, though nothing like the nightmare of
January 1. (See my entry for January 2, 2004.) The guy grinned and shook
his head. He sees this all the time: Kids push on the fiberglass poles
to get them oscillating, then pump them with short synchronized shoves
until they swing so fast that they snap. At some point the city will
replace the pole with an aluminum one having a much lower Q. (EE joke,
sorry.) There are a fair number of pre-teen boys in this immediate area,
one of whom did some minor vandalism in the house here while it was
being built. Carol wonders why we got all the boys here; where the hell
are the girls in the 10-to-15 population? Among our friends who have
children, boys outnumber girls by about 3:2. We know five different
families with at least two kids who have only boys, but only one with
only girls. (One of those girls, Cathy
Covington, was the youngest author ever to publish in Visual
Developer, at age 13. She's gonna be scary when she's 30!)
Quick, let's find a reasonable explanation before somebody blames antibiotics
in the milk!

Reader Eero Kankia sent me a link to a good piece by Jim Turley called
"Ten
Lies About Microprocessors". I had to grin at Lie #5, that Java
Chips Are Coming. Ironic indeed, this obsession with implementing virtual
machines in silicon. I saw it a very long time ago (1976 or so) when
there actually was a chipset that implemented the UCSD P-machine in
silicon. I lusted after one, but couldn't afford it, which was a good
thing. They were slow, and inflexible, and died the death shortly after
I first saw one. If the whole point of Java (and UCSD, and the .NET
IL is to achieve hardware independence, trying to burn it all into the
hardware is a real head scratcher. Yet another thing on my list is to
learn C# and the .NET framework, to see just how good a VM can be...I
just need another life and a half to get there.

I get regular messages from boomers like me who have read my
article on Hi-Flier kites and want to know how to make a kite like
that. I really need to do a Web article on kitemaking, but in the meantime,
I think there's an opportunity here for somebody to find a Pacific Rim
manufacturer to create period replicas of those 10c paper kites that
we used to fly back in 1963. I have an original American Beauty, but
I paid $10 for it on eBay and now use it as wall art. I'd be afraid
to try and fly it, but it's a really good kite and I suspect you could
sell a significant number of them for $4.95, especially if you could
get them into a bin at Restoration Hardware.

One reasonI suspect the major reasonthat the Mac is as
reliable as it is is that Apple also controls the hardware environment
on which its OS runs. (I fully understand why they don't want to implement
OS/X on Intel, even though it's the only thing that will ever get them
out of their 5% market share trap.) Now a company named Element
has done an interesting thing: Developed a line of machines specifically
to run Linux, and a Linux distro called Ion
(based on Debian) specifically to run on that line of machines, and
not available otherwise. This could work, because Element's parent company
is Via, which makes a lot of low-end motherboards that hardware freaks
are putting into toasters and other unconventional cases. If Via designs
a motherboard specifically to run a particular Linux distro, that distro
has a fair chance of running forever, at least until the next power
outage. The machines seem expensive for what they are, but let's watch
and see. It's a great idea.

April 14, 2004:

As I've repoted here previously (see my entry
for March 14, 2004) there is an astonishing turnover in spam "payload
domains" (domains for which there are hyperlinks within the bodies of
spam messages) on the order of 12% per day. In other words, 12% of my
spam every day comes either from or carrying domains I've never seen before
and haven't yet blocked.

I have noticed that there are standard patterns in some of those payload
URLs. A typical payload URL from one of my worst spammers looks like this:

http://wjusytd.com/py/

I rarely see the same domain twice from this guy. However, the substring
".com/py/" occurs in every one. Poco's message body filtering is sharp
enough to spot that substring; however, I worry about false positives.
You Python guys out there, tell me if this URL structure is some sort
of standard convention for Python work, or if the /py/ is just something
the spammer made up. I suspect it's a spammer thing, as I get a fair number
(if not quite as many) payload URLs in this form:

http://wjusytd.com/v/

This is mostly curiosity on my part. I'm getting tired of spending hours
hunting for commonalities inside increasingly bland-ized and randomized
spam, and will be moving to something differentprobably including
a new primary email addresssometime soon. Keyword filtering has simply
failed, and I'm sure I've worked on it harder than just about anybody.

April 13, 2004:

Some odd lots as the snow melts and (maybe)
Spring arrives...

Ramsey Electronics
sent me their latest catalog, which includes a video transmitter the
size of a quarter, that runs off a 9V battery and can take video from
any of the common subminiature video cameras. The 100mw model can send
a video signal 700 feet. It gave me this weird idea of building a padded
module that could be lifted by a kite, and transmit a video signal of
the ground as the kite flies. When the weather improves, I intend to
try flying kites off my back deck. It would be wild to see myselfand
the house, and the neighborhoodas the kite sees us.

We're down under a hundred boxes now, and about a quarter of those
are already in the mechanical room (what they now call a basement, at
least out here) and will not be opened in the near future. I've been
oiling the teak shelves down in the family room as time permits, and
the remainder of our many books will come out of boxes and go up on
those shelves in the next week or so. A fair number of boxes are in
my workshop, and are already on shelves. I really want to get my test
bench uncrated and set up, but that's a low-priority task right now.
All of this is just to say that we're grinding along and making progress,
but it's almost too mundane a sort of progress to mention here.

Skype released Pocket Skype, which allows you to connect to the Skype
VoIP network from a PocketPC PDA. The product is free and can be downloaded
here. The Pocket
Skype FAQ is worth
reading. As I've found with the Windows version, Skype is compute-intensive,
and audio doesn't work well on PCs slower than 450 or 500 MHz. They
recommend a 400 MHz PDA for Pocket Skype, and for now there is no version
for Palm OS. You can use Skype's text messaging feature over GPRS, but
to do actual voice calls you'll have to connect to the Internet through
a high-speed connection like Wi-Fi. I don't think I got the PDA gene,
but if you find yourself in a Wi-Fi hotspot, this could be useful for
making voice calls to other Skype users. I'll wait and see what my PDA
fanatic associates have to say about it.

My idea of a client-side black hole for blocking spam is apparently
being developed, in a project called SURBL.
It's basically a list of domains advertised by spammers inside their
messages. These domains are what I call the "payload" of a spam message,
and are one of the last reliable things you can filter on, especially
if you can resolve them to IP addresses. Right now there isn't a lot
of software that can filter using SURBL, but I suspect more will happen
over time. There's a SpamAssassin plug-in and that's about it, but it's
interesting to imagine what could be done by adding SURBL filtering
abilities to POPTray (see yesterday's entry.) As POPTray is written
in Delphi, it's worth a look, when I can get some time. The obvious
way to use SURBL from scratch is to create a POP proxy that parses out
URLs from message bodies and compares them against the SURBL list. I
suspect such a creature to appear eventually; if you spot one, do let
me know.

If any of you are Poco Mail users, take a look at my latest junkbody.txt
and junksender.txt files, which I just uploaded to my ftp site at ftp.duntemann.com.
There is some (I think about 15-20%) duplication between them, so if
you're going to try combining them into a single file, be sure to purge
dupes. I haven't purged "dead" domains from the list yet, and recent
experiments with a DNS resolver show that about 40% of them are no longer
connected to an IP. Still, they have been pretty damned useful keeping
my inbox clear.

April 12, 2004:

While
researching email tools for my new book, I stumbled across an interesting
software gadget: the POPTray email notifier.
It's free, open source, and (most wonderfully) written in Delphi. What
it's for may take a little explanation:

POPTray sits in the Windows taskbar tray, and every so often (you set
the interval; mine is set at one minute) it goes up to your POP server
and looks at the messages waiting for your regular email client. You can
set rules based on several parameters, primarily the sender address. If
POPTray sees a message from a specified sender, it will pop up a balloon
message to let you know, or (if you enable it) sound an audio announcement.

This is useful if you want to get mail from certain people as soon as
it arrives, but don't want to be fooling with your email client every
ten minutes. Once POPTray sounds off, you can launch your regular mail
client, or even take a peek at the message in POPTray's own window. Basically,
you can read your email only twice a day, and still get those priority
messages as soon as they arrive.

POPTray's other use is to delete messages from known spammers before
you waste time downloading them to your mail client's inbox. Eyeballing
my spam indicated that a relatively small number of domains generated
a great deal of spam. I often get as many as thirty spams a day from OptinRealBig
megaspammer moosq.com alone. By setting up only about 25 rules, I eliminate
about 40% of my spam before I ever download mail, which makes the downloads
go a lot more quickly.

POPTray is a great deal like what I had envisioned for my Aardmail email
robot. Since I have the source, I intend to look into adding a client-side
black hole feature. I have bits and pieces of the code already done and
tested; how hard could it be to pull it all together? (Don't answer that...)

April 11, 2004:

Easter Sunday. (And we have almost a foot of
snow on the ground! Do people here dream of a "White Easter"?) Continuing
the thread I've been following these last few days of Holy Week:

The real challenge to those of us who are convinced that Christianity
is a good thing is to "out" the lie of Manichaeism anywhere we
see it. Doing that requires that we recognize it for what it is, which
in turn requires a little background.

The early Christian teacher Mani (216-277) was simply laying out his
interpretation of an ancient wisdom school that originated in Persia before
the time of Christ: That the True God is completely spiritual, and so
removed from this world of matter that He cannot be apprehended by human
beings in any way. The physical world was created by a sadistic godling
called the Demiurge and his demonic minions the Archons, as a trap for
pure spirits (us!) within physical bodies that seem incapable of accomplishing
good, or doing anything but suffering. This school of belief goes by the
technical term Gnostic dualism, and although it existed long before
Mani, he systematized it and popularized it, extending it from its roots
in Persia throughout the known world.

The Christian Church rightly condemned Mani and his theology. What the
Church could not anticipate is the hold that Mani's worldview had upon
the poor beset human beings of his time. It was the perfect explanation
for the conundrum of theodicy: How can evil and suffering exist in a universe
created by a benign and loving God? Easy! God didn't create the universe!
It's a trap set by the Bad Guy! The real God didn't have anything to do
with this filthy, nasty, flea-infested, plague and famine-beset world
of suffering!

So although Manichaeism as a religion or even a coherent theology perished
over a millennium ago, the Manichaean worldview stuck hard to the
bootheels of humanity. That worldview can be simply expressed: Matter
Bad. Spirit Good.

And oh, the trouble that this has caused. The medieval Church absorbed
Manichaean ideas to the extent that it emphasized the freeing of humanity
from matter altogether, in that this world was to be stoically endured
but not loved until such time as God freed us from matter's torments in
death. Echoes of the Demiurge can be found in the Anselmian notion of
an angry God the Father who would have roasted all of us in hell for the
sin of simply having been born unless Jesus hadn't bought His Father off
with His suffering and death.

The notion of healing is alien to the Manichaean worldview. There can
be no healing because matter is irredeemable and implacably opposed to
spiritual goodness. Sex was frowned on and in some places demonized, echoing
the Manichaean teaching that sex traps divine spirits in corrupt bodies
and thus should be avoided at all costs. Because most pleasures are physical
pleasures (and rooted in our interaction with matter) Manichaeism found
pleasure of all kinds suspect at best, and often condemned.

Matter Bad, Spirit Good begat Pleasure Bad, Suffering Good.
As though to throw it back in the face of the implied Demiurge, suffering
was elevated to a kind of perverse virtue, and monastics thought they
were sanctifying themselves in God's eyes by beating themselves with whips.
Almost unbelievably, this practice was a commonplace until the Second
Vatican Council in 1960. Garry Wills recounts in his autobiographical
work, Why I Am a Catholic, that as a young Jesuit seminarian in
the 1950s he was required to beat himself with a small whip called "the
discipline" and wear chains around his waist that rubbed his skin bloody.
(My suspicion is that a revolt against such Manichaean excesses was what
caused the Jesuits to morph into one of the most liberal of Catholic religious
orders by 1970.) Monasticism has a natural tendency toward Manichaeism,
and Henry VIII's dissolution of the English monasteries, although entirely
venal in intent, had the accidental benefit of eliminating one of the
major breeding grounds of Manichaean excess from the English Church.

It took until 1960 for voices within the Catholic Church to dare claim
that the mission of Christ and the Church was one of healing, and not
one of lopsided Divine justice that required infinite suffering to atone
for finite transgression. We will be centuries getting that message across;
I guess it's no failure that we haven't entirely won the war in only 40
years.

When today's malcontents rail against Christianity, they're really railing
against those aspects of Christianity that still cling to Manichaean cruelty.
Many sects within Christianity have given it over almost entirely, but
those that don't get a lot of press. Mel Gibson's penitentialist church
is tiny, and yet it makes national news because of its benefactor. Those
Catholic sects that have disavowed Manichaeism labor mostly in obscurity.
I first saw such a sect when I discovered Old Catholicism, and am discovering
another in high-church Episcopalianism, which in some places (like St.
Raphael's parish where we currently worship) are almost indistinguishable.
Ultimately we will save Catholicism from Manichaeism, but it will be a
long climb.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, but I'm going to give it a rest
for awhile. Just writing about it makes me depressed, and Easter Sunday
is no time for depression. Easter is a feast of exultation and renewal,
healing and hope. If it weren't snowing I'd fly a kite (see my entry for
April 15, 2001) but at this point,
sitting down in my cozy chair with a good book will more than compensate.
The time for exultation is coming; only about a hundred more boxes to go!

April 10, 2004:

Holy Saturday. Continuing with the thread I
began yesterday, sparked by several inquiries about my feelings about
Mel Gibson's hugely popular (and terrifyingly gruesome) film, The Passion
of the Christ.

Gibson's film has resurrected a really, really stupid and loaded
question: Who killed Jesus? The implication, of course, is that
the Jews killed Jesus, which is what most people are actually asserting
when they ask the question. This was in fact the historical Christian
position for almost 2000 years, and many Jews were tormented and killed
over it. Stuff like that dies hard. Until the dawn of the 20th century,
there was a prayer in many Catholic liturgies for Good Friday called "The
Reproaches of the Jews," which was basically a scold asking that Divine
punishment be visited upon the Jews as "Christ killers."

It is true that a literal reading of the accounts of the Passion in the
Gospels would give that impression. The objective truth is a lot more
complex. Until the Jewish War of 66-70 AD, when the Romans destroyed the
Jewish Temple and scattered the Jewish people, Judaism was an officially
sanctioned and much-admired religion within the Roman empire. The Romans
liked religion of all sorts, because it was a factor in social stability,
which they valued highly. After the Spartacus slave revolt in 73 BC, the
Romans became (justifiably) paranoid about political agitation. Spartacus
had practically shattered the empire; had he been a better leader, Italy
might have been split from its northern lands, and the Empire might have
collapsed centuries before it eventually did.

The Holy Land in the First Century was not the tranquil realm suggested
by the Gospel accounts of Jesus' public ministry. The secular histories
of the time paint a picture of a land in turmoil, full of minor riots
and viciously suppressed uprisings against Roman rule. In 63 BC the Roman
general Pompey had (after killing over 12,000 Jews) desecrated the Jewish
Holy of Holies by riding his horse into the middle of it, which was a
blasphemy unlike anything the Jews had seen for many centuries. The Jews
did not suffer Roman rule especially well, and insurrection was always
just a hair below the surface of Jewish culture.

By 66 AD, the Romans had had enough. Nero gave the order to level Jerusalem,
and the order was carried out. After that, it was almost as dangerous
to be a Jew as it would later be to be a Christian. The Romans would tolerate
any religion...if that religion's followers would grant the Roman
Emperor primacy. After all, to the pagan Romans, a god was a god was a
god.

This is why the Gospels give no mention of Jewish unrest in the 30s AD,
and tread so lightly on the Romans: The Gospels were written after the
destruction of the Temple, in the 80s, and the Romans were very
twitchy about the Jewish Wars.

The truth is this: The Romans killed Jesus. There was doubtless some
complicity in certain Jewish quarters, particularly among those largely
Hellenized Jews who administered Jerusalem and the Temple, and had the
most to lose in case of a Jewish uprising and the inevitable armed Roman
response. However, in terms of religious feeling, those could barely be
called Jewish, and were often held in contempt by observant Jews, some
of whom (like the SicariiLatin for "daggermen", assasins) would
hide knives under their robes and murder those barely-Jewish Roman collaborators
on dark streets when they felt they could get away with it.

Why do we know this? First from the secular histories of the time:

The historical Pontius Pilate was not a nice guy. He could (charitably)
be called a murderous thug, and would not have wasted a moment's conscience
(if he ever had one) suffering over whether Jesus was guilty. Anybody
who was hauled in by Roman authorities for sedition or (worse) insurrection
was summarily put to death. Small fry were dispatched by whatever way
was easiest; beheading being very common. Where Pilate had a leader
in custody and wished to set an example, he used crucifixion. 60,000
slaves had been crucified along the Appian Way after the Spatacus slave
revolt had been put down. He did not need convincing to execute criminals,
or even innocent men, if it suited his purposes.

Only the Romans could crucify. The Jews did have a death penalty,
but it was by stoning, and after Pompey's conquest of the Jews, they
needed Roman permission to impose it. Because crucifixion was a psychological
weapon for maintaining order under Roman rule, the Romans were quite
jealous of its use.

There are also some hints in the Gospels themselves:

Jesus rode into Jerusalem with much ceremony, with a huge crowd waving
palms (this is why Palm Sunday is called what it is) and shouting their
allegiance to him. The crowds seemed likely to crown him King, and in
reality they probably did. This was a problem. There was already a Roman-sanctioned
King of the Jews: Herod, who was not much liked by observant Jews like
Jesus and his followers. For a guy to ride into town in the thick of
near-riotous adulation and talk of a new King would have been way more
than enough for the Romans to execute Jesus for insurrection. Spartacus
had cast a long shadow.

Shortly before his arrest, Jesus famously lost it in the Temple, turning
over the moneychanger's tables with a "whip of cords," and generally
making a mess. The sparse Gospel accounts imply that he was acting alone,
but that would have been tough. The Temple was immense. More than 20,000
people, Jews and non-Jews, worked in the administrative functions there.
It was their center of government and a sort of national bank. There
were Jewish guards, especially among the money changers, and a garrison
of at least a hundred Roman soldiers to keep order within its walls.
Jesus would have been grabbed the moment he showed belligerence, and
would not have gotten anywhere near enough to the money changers to
have done any physical damage. The implication: Jesus had followers,
thousands of followers, enough to overwhelm everyday Temple defenses,
and basically take control of the public areas for at least a few hours.
Eventually the Roman garrison restored order, but it was no secret who
the leader of the riot was. Jesus may not have planned or intended a
riot in the Temple, but to the Romans that wasn't any defense.

Basically, Jesus had the observant, religious Jews of Jerusalem behind
him all the way, and it's likely that huge numbers of Jews died at Roman
hands between the mid-30s and the Jewish War of 66-70 AD. Had the Gospel
accounts told the unvarnished and unsoftened truth, they would not have
come down to us today, and many historians feel that the Roman persecutions
of Christians in later centuries were at least in part a consequence of
the long Roman memories of Jewish uprisings. For the first hundred-odd
years, Christianity only gradually shed its identity as a breakway Jewish
sect, and to Roman eyes, that breakway was much less clear than it was
to the Christians themselves.

The Gospels shifted the blame from the Romans to the Jews because they had
to if Christianity were to survive. It did, and survived to first swallow
the Roman Empire and later most of the known world. There is nothing about
the Gospel accounts of Jewish agitation against Christ that are central
to the Christian message, and it's high time we set that ancient dodge aside.
It was the Romans, and the Romans are gone. Let's get over it!

April 9, 2004:

Good Friday. Because I'm a theist (and a Catholic
of some stripe, though the color of the stripe is still in flux) people
have been asking me what I think of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the
Christ. That's a complicated question. First of all, I haven't and
won't see the film itself. I simply do not see films depicting vivid cruelty,
religious or otherwise, and apparently Gibson has outdone himself depicting
the cruelty of the Crucifixion. No thanks. Just hearing the Passion according
to St. John read in church earlier today brought tears to my eyes. I can
imagine it well enough. Nobody has to paint me a picture.

I've read enough about it, however, to go a little bit higher in perspective,
and state my position generally on what I call "penitentialism," which
is the subculture within Catholicism (and probably places in Protestantism)
that emphasizes the sinfulness of mankind above everything else, and sees
all of Catholic theology through that lens. That Gibson belongs to the
penitentialist crowd is pretty obvious. I have special feelings about
penitentialism for a couple of reasons:

My mother's religious culture was definitely penitentialist; gruesomely
so, in fact. She died in despair of being saved, having swallowed that
hateful koolaid by the bucket in her youth, and was unable to cast it
aside even in her seventies. I easily carried her shrunken form from
my sister's house to the car on our way to the hospital two days before
she died. She couldn't have weighed more than sixty pounds, and looked
like a famine victim on all those 70's Biafra posters. I can't get that
memory out of my head. Let's just say that I have a grudge, and I will
be a long time losing it.

By a nasty coincidence, my poor mother lived in a parish run by the
Passionist order of Catholic priests most of her adult life. The Passionists
were grim, black-robed monastics who reveled in the agony of Christ
(which is really what they mean when they cite "the Passion" ) and avidly
grilled their parishioners about their sex lives in the confessional,
and for the most part were no fun to be around, since they seemed incapable
of shaking off the terror that somewhere in their parish, somebody was
having a good time. The last priest I ever went to confession to as
a teenager was a Passionist, who had the gall to call masturbation "self
abuse" while being a chain smoker himself.

Penitentialism is the modern expression of the Manichaean heresy,
which is the heresy that actually won the war against Christianity,
but in a peculiar and stealthy way: by abandoning its explicit theology,
and persevering as an extremist culture within Christian life, which
then dribbled back like clotting blood into the cracks of Christian
faith, staining everything it touched with the stench of despair and
death. Manichaeism is an interesting thing. I've been accused of seeing
a Manichaean under every bed, and it's truebecause there is
a Manichaean under every Christian bed. Manichaeism is one of the Terrible
Trinity of things that I absolutely cannot abide, the other two
being cynicism and tobacco.

What bothers me about films like The Passion of the Christ is
more than just the SFX of hooked whips tearing chunks of flesh from Jesus'
back. The core of my discontent is that the Passion is meaningless outside
the context of the three Great Miracles of the life of Christ: The Transfiguration,
the Resurrection, and the Ascension. Christ's pain was both physical and
emotional, and any human being can potentially feel the same degree of
agony that He felt. By itself, the Passion is just another human tragedy.
Unless set in the matrix of the Incarnation and appreciated as part of
that ineffable organic whole, the Passion alone is simply a celebration
of human cruelty and a condemnation of human nature. I'll have none of
it.

If you'll grant me a few more days to speak of matters religious (which,
as with politics, I strive to keep to a minimum here) I'll follow this thread
a little further.

April 8, 2004:

Some software products appear to succeed in
spite of the fact that they're lousy. Qualcomm's Eudora
email client is a perfect example. I used it years ago and thought I'd
gone to heaven when I moved to Outlook Express, egad. Well, I'm back in
Eudora land, because it's supposedly the third most popular email client
(after Outlook and Express) and I have to cover it in Degunking Email,
Spam, and Viruses.

I bought the full version of Eudora 6.1 for $50 (at least it's deductable)
and I've been poking at it for a day or two. The product hasn't changed
much since 1995 (it was first released in 1991!) and its clunky UI is
at odds with almost every other major application out there, including
all the most popular email clients. Only Pegasus Mail is less intuitive.
Let me catalog a few of my discontents:

Balloon help isn't available for the mailbox column headers. Some
of the icons are intuitive, and a few are labeled, but most are not.
I had to guess what the Junk Score column was from context.

There is no way to prevent the preview pane—either Eudora's
native pane or IE—from downloading embedded images. I'm sure in
my early poking around I have already verified my address to several
spam beasons—not that my spam situation can get a whole lot worse.
(I'm planning on turning off my venerable email address when this project
is over anyway. Enough is enough.)

In Eudora's native preview pane, there is no way to copy the URL in
a hyperlink to the clipboard. You can highlight a URL and use Windows'
Ctrl-C, but all you'll get is the URL's displayed text, not the underlying
Web or email address. To get a right-click lift of the URL, you need
to use IE as your preview pane, with all the security risks that that
entails.

Online help is badly written, wretchedly formatted, and confusing.
Looks a lot, in fact, like what everybody was fielding back in 1995...almost
nine years later. Everybody else has learned how to create good online
help. Not Eudora.

Although I may be misconstruing something in the (incomprehensible)
documentation, as best I can tell the feature that imports data from
an Outlook .pst file just doesn't work. A clue that something isn't
quite kosher comes from the fact that the dialog has two identical edit/browse
controls asking for the path to the .pst. WTF?

That's just the stuff I've been able to spot so far. This release as a whole
is intriguing: Version 6.1 comes with a new trainable (the algorithm isn't
stated) spam filter, which I'll try training in coming days. Still, for
probably the oldest mail client still in common use (except maybe PC Pine)
you'd think they'd be a little more, um, cutting edge.

April 7, 2004:

Catholic spirituality, prior to the "opening
up" of Vatican II, was a very insular culture, and odd in ways that few
remember these days, even those of us who were there. Back at Immaculate
Conception Elementary School in Chicago, the bell rang every hour on the
hour, and no matter what else we students happened to be doing, we stopped
cold and in unison said a very brief prayer: "Most sacred heart of Jesus,
all for thee: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" The prayer was said quickly, rhythmically,
and emphatically, and in looking back, what it reminds me of most was
a football cheer. Prior to 1960, the technical term for this prayer was
ejaculation. Really. And if you look in older dictionaries, that's
what you'll see: "A short, emphatic prayer put forth in time of temptation,"
according to my three-volume 1936 Century Dictionary, which I keep
precisely for occasions like this. (Arcane vocabulary, and literacy in
general, went into decline after WWII.) As for the temptation, well, if
you were a Catholic in the 1950s, every moment was a moment of temptation,
since virtually everything entering the mind of a Catholic was a temptation
to one sin or another.

When I was in third grade (1960) the nuns quietly changed the jargon,
and we no longer ejaculated every hour. The holy football cheer was the
same, but was now called an aspiration. I note with some amusement
that this meaning of "aspiration" is not in my Century Dictionary
nor anywhere else, unless one bends the meaning of "lofty intention" to
mean "a short, punchy prayer that sounds like a football cheer."

All this came to mind after reading a short piece in the Wall Street
Journal this morning, citing new medical research indicating quite
clearly that frequent ejaculation reduces the risk of prostate cancer
in men. Now, this other (medical) meaning of "ejaculation" was a frequent
topic of the Passionist priests who ran our parish, in the confessional
and on occasional "boys only" pep talks in seventh and eighth grades,
the prime purpose of which seemed to be to scare us away from masturbation.
Back then, masturbation was a peculiar obsession among Catholic priests
(projection, anyone?) and if I hadn't heard them talk about it in school
I truthfully wouldn't have known what it was. (I remember riding my bike
down to the Carol Roden branch of the Chicago Public Library in 1965 to
do some further research.)

If the two species of ejaculation were in any way related, and if frequent
ejaculation really does prevent prostate cancer, Catholic boys my age should
be absolutely immune. The research cited in the Journal claimed that "frequent
ejaculation" was twenty times per month; heck, we did it six times a day.
And far from being "self-abuse" (as the older priests called it, without
ever explaining why it was "abuse") if masturbation does in fact ward off
the second-most prevalent carcinomic killer of men, the only moral thing
for the Church to do would be to de-criminalize it. (I won't insist that
they endorse it, or teach it. That would be cruelto the Church.) Alas,
it took the Church 500 years to forgive Galileo for teaching that the Earth
moves around the Sun. Masturbation may get out of the penalty box someday,
but it's gonna be a while.

April 6, 2004:

Damn.
The resistors won't go back into their bins.

Back in 1992, I bought a rotating parts tower from Turnkey to bring
my chaotic electronics parts storage system into some kind of order. A
parts tower is a rotating stack of 12 multibin cabinets, and although
it took me a couple of months to get my small parts out of milk jugs and
cardboard boxes (my larger parts like tube sockets and relays are still
in milk jugs) it made a tremendous difference.

Moving it, however, was a pain. I took each little bin (there are over
200) and dumped its contents into a sandwich-sized Glad Bag. For partially
full bins, the bagged parts would go back into the bin. For full bins,
parts plus bag would not fit, and so I left the bin empty and put the
bagged parts into a separate cardboard box. Once the bins were all bagged,
I took the tower apart and stored it all (with abundant newspaper for
padding) in two large boxes, where it sat for well over a year.

As time allows (it's a low-priority project, at least for now) I've been
un-bagging my parts and getting the parts tower back into full working order.
The problem lies with those full bins. The bagged parts wouldn't fit back
into the bins—so why would I assume that after dumping the parts back
into the bins, the bins would fit back in their cabinets? I had originally
placed the resistors into the bins one or two at a time, as I sorted them
by value. As a chaotic wad, the resistors are about 30% larger than they
were when they were all neatly placed, with leads in alignment and scarcely
enough space between them for an SMT diode. Rattling and shaking the bins
made little difference. I may have to dump them all out on the counter and
put them back in as they went in to begin with: one at a time. Uggh.

April 5, 2004:

Some odd lots on a pretty busy day: (but aren't
they all?)

Many things are less clear than they used to be (remember the old
Monkees song, "Shades of Gray"?) and this doesn't exclude Jupiter's
Great Red Spot, which is now so pale an orange-pink that it's often
hard to see. Then again, it's several hundred years old, so if it truly
is something as ill-defined as a thunderstorm in the Jovian atmosphere,
I suppose it can be forgiven for fading a little. Pete Albrecht sent
me the still photo of Jupiter at right, perhaps the most detailed shot
he's taken so far, with the Great Red Spot in the lower-central portion
of the image.

Several people sent me this
link (which I also saw on Slashdot) to an account of a 419-scammer
who was captured at an Irish Internet cafe. I've heard several people
in the community hotspot movement insist that spammers are not a problem
with wide-open hotspots, but clearly that's not true. My view here is
that the solution is not to lock down free hotspots, but rather to get
some sort of global email authorization standard and system in place
as soon as possible. Once that happens (let us pray for a when,
not an if) the spam problem will vanish almost overnight.

Wired News posted a short news item (no link) citing a research
study published in the journal Pediatrics, indicating that watching
TV early in life can lead to all sorts of problems by age 7, from attention
deficit disorder to obesity and violent behavior. I watched a fair amount
of TV as a child, and I ducked all these bullets, so you have to wonder
if it's the nature of the content rather than the medium itself. (Or
is it simply the sugar that they're munching while they're watching?)

I went out to see Hellboy last night (what a thing to do in
Holy Week!) and I was entertained, though I didn't love the flick so
much as to write up a tremendously detailed review. (Amazingly, it got
rave reviews from the Wall Street Journal.) It's a classic comic
book plot, of an infant demon released from Hell (or something like
it) by Nazi occultist scientists at the end of WWII, who is raised by
an American scientist to battle various Lovecraftian slimies, as well
as clockwork-cyborg Nazis and a shaven-headed Rasputin. The monsters
are in fact pretty forgettable, and the battles against them got repetitive
after awhile. Far more interesting were Hellboy's struggles to deal
with loving a half-psychotic "firestarter" woman who roasts her immediate
vicinity if anybody hits her. (Hellboy, given his provenance, is fireproof,
making them a natural couple.) The best scene in the whole movie may
well be of Hellboy (who is kind of a bright-red Incredible Hulk) sitting
on a rooftop with a nine-year-old boy, discussing how to talk to girls.
Ron Perlman, who plays Hellboy, also played the Beast in the cult-favorite
Beauty and the Beast TV series from the late 1980s. He clearly
has the sensitive monster thing down cold. There is a lot of muddy subterranean
tunnel action, some cool steampunk tomb machinery, and a gill-man who
sounds a lot like C3PO. Worth $6, maybe not worth $8 or $10. Cautiously
recommended.

April 4, 2004:

Perhaps the solution to outsourcing IT jobs
to India is to outsource IT jobs to...Goodland, Kansas. Rick Tompkins
sent me a link to a
Businesseek Online article indicating that IT people would work for
lessmuch lessif only given the chance. It makes you
wonder if businesses actually prefer hiring in a foreign country,
perhaps hoping to duck our lawyer-crazed employment scene. Hard to tell,
but the question that arises from the article is this: Can an IT professional
live happily on $40,000 a year? Depends. In Silicon Valley, forget it.
But there are small towns all through the Great Plains and the West where
you can still buy a decent 3-bedroom house for less than $100,000. As
broadband gradually makes its way into sparsely-populated areas, a guy
who doesn't need to drive a Porsche could probably do well in a small
town.

I actually suggested this in one of my editorials in Visual Developer
Magazine years ago, and ignited a firestorm from a significant number
of people who hate small towns so virulently that I had to shake my head
and grin. What do small towns have (or lack) that makes them so hateful
to bicoastals? I wish I knew. My suspicions: no raves, no piercing parlors,
and no population of clueless young women allowing guys so inclined to
have sex with a different one every weekend. Gawrsh! What kind of life
is that?

The standard complaint that small towns are "boring" comes mostly from young
people. Middle agers like me would as soon turn off the PC at the end of
the day, cook and enjoy a nice dinner with our spouses, and then read a
good book until bedtime. So given that middle-aged ITers have borne the
brunt of unemployment in the current IT depression, the idea may have some
merit: Start an IT consulting firm that works cheap, but first get your
asses out of the big city. As American firms begin to bid up the price of
Indian IT guys who know Oracle, small-town American may well begin to compete.

April 3, 2004:

For
the most part, I loathe animated GIFs, but Pete Albrecht sent me one unlike
any other I'd ever seen: He created an animation from the many individual
photos he took of the shadow transit of several Galilean moons across
Jupiter last Saturday. (See my entry for March 28, 2004.) Your Web browser
should be animating it automatically, unless you have GIF animation turned
off, which some browsers (including IE) support. The instrument was a
12" Meade LX-200, with a Phillips ToUCam webcam, set up out in Pete's
backyard in Orange County.

Instruments like the Meade LX-200 series have turned amateur astronomy inside-out
over the past couple of years. New software is appearing constantly (oddly,
much of it comes out of France) and one of Pete's more recent finds sights
on a star and measures the periodic guide error stemming from imperfections
in the main drive worm wheel, so it can apply a cancelling bias to the scope's
drives. Some time this summer I'm going to perform some surgery on Pete's
ToUCam and mine to allow them to take long-exposure photos. This won't help
me much (both my scopes are junkbox specials and lack sidereal drives) but
I'm licking my chops anticipating the deep-sky work Pete will be able to
do then.

April 2, 2004:

The code I allowed myself a few hours to write
the other day was something I've wanted to do for a long time: Create
a system to resolve IP addresses for the immense collection of spammer
domains I've gathered since about December 1, 2003. It wasn't just one
program, and the three short utilities I wrote weren't very tidy, but
their job was to process the PocoMail junkenders.txt and junkbody.txt
files to knock out anything that wasn't a domain name, and then build
a master-detail database of domains and IPs. The goal was to see how "concentrated"
domain name ownership is among spammers.

The total number of spammer domains I had gathered was 5,033. I wanted
to know whether those domains represented 5,033 different IP addresses,
or if most spammers had several or many IPs.

I also wanted to know how many of those domains had been abandoned and
were no longer DNSed to an IP address.

So here are the results:

I began with about 6,800 text lines in both files.

Knocking out phone numbers, things like "vi@!gra" and so on took the
count down to 5,033 real domains.

In the process of running the resolver/database builder (which took
over six hours to run!) the system recorded 2,251 unresolvable domains;
that is, domains that had been abandoned and no longer resolve to an
IP address and are thus dead.

The 2,782 "live" domains resolved to a total of 1,114 IP addresses,
or about two and a half domains per IP.

The distribution, however, was interesting: There are a lot of spammers
with one domain, and a lot of spammers with a lot of domains. There
are not a lot of spammers with only three or four domains.

The largest spammers have multiple IPs. I could tell this by similarities
in the domain names that they used, and by the fact that their IP addresses
were sequential within a Class 3 subnet.

I wasn't horribly surprised by this. I was a little surprised at how
many spammers have only one domain for an IP, and it brings up the question
of how long a given domain "lives" (that is, points to an IP) before the
spammer abadons it, registers another domain, and attaches it to the IP
address. Domains (especially .biz and .info) are sold very cheaply in
bulk, so using a domain only a handful of timeseven once!can
pay handsomely, and it makes filtering much more difficult.

If anybody actually wants to see the database, I'll try and find some time
to build a self-explanatory database browser for it and put it up on my
FTP site. I'll be tinkering the database and the utilities as time allows,
and ultimately I still hope to create the Aardmail email robot to automatically
nuke spam out of my POP mailbox before it gets down to Poco. A client-side
IP black hole in Aardmail would be useful, but without knowing the life
of an IP (that is, how long do spammers keep a static IP) I can't yet tell
how useful. More thought and tinkering are needed. Stay tuned.

April 1, 2004:

As Michael Covington spoke of recently in his
Web diary (March
13, 2004), we all get "hack attacks" periodically. I use "hack" here
in the old and honorable sense, that is to say, to joyfully mess around
with programming because it feels good to do so. It's only very recently
(like, the last couple of days) that I've been able to spare any moments
for hacking, though I've felt the itch for many months. So yesterday,
I gave myself a fair bit of time (several hours) and just played around.

Hoo-boy, was I rusty. I forgot a key fact about Delphi that drove me
nuts, until Ben Oram reminded me that exception handling works differently
when you're inside the IDE. My face was very red. I knew that...somewhere.
But I had forgotten. I thought, at first, that it was about being 51,
then thought better of it. I have a different theory, and (as many or
even most of you are recreational programmers) I thought I'd run it past
you to see what you think:

When I first learned programming 25-odd years ago, programming was about
languages. A language (for me, primarily Pascal, though I've worked in
many others) is a structure made for the expression of logic. Languages
convey the philosophies of their creators, and once you read up on those
philosophies (or reverse-engineer the philosophies from the languages
themselves) the syntatic and semantic details of the language stick better,
because they're embedded in a larger context.

I learned Pascal quickly and waved its banner passionately throughout
all the years that it was a power in American computing. Even today, I've
forgotten almost none of my Pascal, and Pascal wasn't what was giving
me grief yesterday. It was APIs, and IDE details. Programming today is
not to any great degree about languages. (You need to know the language
you work in, and you're expected to pick it up almost immediately. I took
a full year to get good at Pascal. I wouldn't have that option today.)
What programming is really about is stitching things together, using language
statements as glue. Although your code can be well-written, well-commented,
and even elegant in its design, the code that you write is in fact
a small part of the program that you create. You have little control
over the other parts, and in most cases you don't have source for them.
But worst of all, the jungle of API calls is completely chaotic, and has
no overall structure that you can use to help remember the whole thing.

And the APIs are legion. Object Pascal is a relatively small part of
Delphi programming these days. You need to be able to keep a multitude
of chaotic details in the forefront of your brain while programming: Component
methods and properties and and RTL features of various kinds, and a miles-deep
IDE (anybody recall the elegance of Turbo Pascal v1-3?) with hundreds
of non-obvious options and gotchas.

This may be necessary today. Programming is not what it was 25 years
ago, given the richness of I/O, ubiquitous networking, and everything
else. But I was appalled how quickly the chaotic details flowed out the
back of my head over the three or four recent months when I didn't produce
any new code myself. The only way to keep it all in your head is to do
it all the time. Being an "occasional programmer" is much tougher today
than it used to be. I intuit that there's a book in there somewhere, and
if I can find the book in the issue I will write it.

BTW, the hack attack was an interesting one indeed, and I'll describe what
I did tomorrow.